Cristina C. Arguedas

Cris Arguedas is recognized as one of the finest criminal defense lawyers in the United States. In her 20-plus years in private practice, she has represented high-profile clients in some of the most visible cases around the country, as well as many little-known clients on relatively routine matters that never make the nightly news.

Cris is equally adept at handling complex white-collar cases, sensational murders, and the full range of less serious criminal cases. She works closely with other ACHG lawyers as well as a team of investigators, jury consultants and other top experts she has assembled over more than two decades.

Singled out for her thorough preparation, shrewd strategizing, and impressive courtroom skills, Cris has been named the lawyer other lawyers would hire if they got arrested (California Lawyer), one of the 10 best lawyers in the Bay Area (San Francisco Chronicle, Northern California Super Lawyers), one of the 50 most influential women lawyers in the United States (National Law Journal), one of the 100 top lawyers in California (San Francisco Daily Journal, The Recorder), and one of the five most promising women lawyers in the country (Time). She was named to “The International Who’s Who of Business Crime Lawyers 2010”, is a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, and in 2010 was inducted into the Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame of the Litigation Section of the State Bar of California (an honor shared by only 20 other attorneys in the State).

Cris’s expertise also makes her a highly sought-after lecturer, teacher, and advisor to public officials in both major parties. She has served on advisory committees for the District Attorney of San Francisco and for the current and two past United States Attorneys for the Northern District of California. At the statewide level, she has been appointed to several commissions on judicial standards by the Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court. Cris has also headed U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer’s Federal Judicial Selection Committee, which recommends nominees for the federal judiciary and for the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California.

A New Jersey native, Cris graduated summa cum laude from Rutgers Law School in 1979. She came West to work on landmark battered-women’s cases, helped defend one of Patty Hearst’s kidnappers, and then landed a plum job as an assistant federal public defender in San Francisco—almost unheard-of in an office that had its pick of far more experienced lawyers. At 26, she stunned the federal court by filing suit, in conjunction with the Larry Layton-Jonestown massacre murder trial, to have the local grand jury selection process declared unconstitutional on racial grounds. While still a public defender, Cris met Penny Cooper, a Berkeley attorney who was a legend in the Bay Area criminal defense community, when they were trying cases in adjacent courtrooms. Both won, and in 1982, they decided to team up.

In recent years, Cris has made a specialty of defending corporate officials at such companies as Enron, Tosco, British Petroleum, Avant!, and Critical Path. In 1995 she was invited to join the “Dream Team” defending O.J. Simpson on double-murder charges. Her job was to put Simpson through a grueling mock cross-examination to help the defense team determine whether he should testify in court. (He didn’t.)

In 1983, when Cris was 29, Time magazine named her one of the country’s five most promising women lawyers under 35. Since then, she has repeatedly been recognized as one of the nation’s leading criminal defense lawyers by such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the National Law Journal,California Lawyer magazine, San Francisco magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Recorder and Daily Journal legal newspapers, and every edition of Best Lawyers in America published since its inception in 1983.

In 2000, she was elected a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers (an honor reserved for just a tiny percentage of lawyers in the nation), and in 1995 she was named to the International Academy of Trial Lawyers. Aformer president of California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, a statewide criminal defense organization, Cris was named in 2001 as one of a handful of lawyers who other California attorneys would choose to represent them if they found themselves in trouble with the law. In 2010, she received the rare of honor of being inducted into the California State Bar Hall of Fame for Trial Lawyers.

Cris has taught criminal trial practice at Boalt Hall School of Law and trial advocacy at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. She has served on the boards of the Innocence Project of Northern California and the Western Center on Law and Poverty, among many other organizations.

Cris is renowned for her ability to think on her feet, cross-examine witnesses, and negotiate with prosecutors. While admirers praise her as “a born lawyer,” she knows that meticulous preparation is the key to her success.

Many defense lawyers make a basic mistake: They take their time investigating a case, allowing prosecutors to gain an early advantage and retain control through the entire legal process. By contrast, Cris believes that the more she knows about a case—and the earlier she knows it—the better the result will be for her client. “We put a lot of work into the beginning of a case,” she explains, “then figure out both the worst-case scenario and the best place that client can end up, whether that’s no charges filed, an acquittal, or a conviction with a lenient sentence. Next, we craft a strategy to get there. Preparation allows us to control the case. We never let the case control us.”

BE DIRECT Cris and her ACHG colleagues work hard to keep clients fully informed and involved in all parts of their defense. She believes that lawyers serve their clients best by being honest and forthright. “A lot of lawyers soft-pedal bad news,” she says. “But we think that being very up front and direct helps the clients make the best possible choices.”

Some cases, she notes, “need to be fought all the way no matter how strong the prosecution thinks its evidence is.” On the other hand, “if a prosecutor has overwhelming evidence of guilt, it’s very possible that the best thing a person can do is make a good deal at the beginning of the case. If he’s my client, he’s not going to miss that opportunity because he’s living in a world of denial.”

GET TO KNOW THE CLIENT High-profile attorneys are often better at handling cases than dealing with clients; it’s not uncommon for a lawyer to limit his or her knowledge of the client to the facts of the alleged crime. Not Cris. She tries to find out as much as she can about her clients, their families, their troubles, and the crime of which they’re accused. “Our goal is not to judge them,” she says, “but to understand what happened so we can control the course of the case.”

Where appropriate, she will refer a client to counseling or treatment programs. In high-profile cases, Cris works to take the spotlight off the client to ensure fair treatment by prosecutors, judges, and jurors. “For celebrity clients,” she says, “my job is to get them to be treated like they’re not celebrities.” When representing corporate executives—for example, someone accused of wrongdoing in a deadly industrial accident —“my job is often to prevent my client from becoming a scapegoat.”

WORK WITH PROSECUTORS As one of the top defense lawyers in the country, Cris commands enormous respect from prosecutors, and she’s comfortable working with them to protect her clients’ interests. After she and the ACHG team have thoroughly investigated a case, it is not uncommon for her to share her findings with prosecutors, to demonstrate why charges should be reduced or dropped.

“Frequently we are able to talk prosecutors out of bringing cases,” Cris says. On the flip side, she is more than willing to “play the courtroom warrior,” as she puts it, when the situation demands. When prosecutors realize they will face a strong challenge in front of a jury, they often agree to cut her client a more favorable deal.

BE DISCREET Cris does not believe in fighting her battles in the media. She endeavors to keep her clients out of the public eye—not just high-profile corporate executives, but anyone charged with a crime who would be embarrassed by media attention. Sometimes, alas, it is not possible to entirely divert press attention. In such highly publicized cases, Cris helps manage news coverage so that it is more favorable than it might otherwise be.

U.S. District Courts: Northern District of California (1979), Southern District of California (1983), Central District of California (1982), Eastern District of California (1982), and District of Arizona (1991)

2017 California Lawyer Attorney of the Year (“CLAY”) award from California Lawyer for extraordinary achievement in white collar criminal defense in recognition of her work on United States v. FedEx Corp., et al.

2017 White Collar Criminal Defense Award, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and Stetson University College of Law.

Featured in the Daily Journal’s “Top 100 Lawyers in California” September 2015.

Named as a world-leading practitioner in Who’s Who Legal: Business Crime Defence 2014.

Chambers USA 2014 calls Cristina Arguedas “one of the best anywhere,” adding that “she knows everybody and everything there is to know about white-collar.”

Panelist, “Can You Handle The Truth?”2010 Antitrust Spring Meeting, American Bar Association Section of Antitrust Law San Francisco, 2010

Faculty, “Ethics: Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Ethical and Strategic Pitfalls in Representing Individual Targets in International Criminal Antitrust Cases”2010 Antitrust Spring Meeting, American Bar Association Section of Antitrust Law Washington, D.C. 2010

Panelist, Judicial Conference Privacy SubcommitteeFordham Law School New York, New York 2010

Faculty, “Champions of the Courtroom”Annual Trial Symposium of the Litigation Section of the State Bar of California La Jolla, California, 2000

Faculty, “Pitfalls and Pluses of Video: Effective Use of Videotaped Evidence at Trial”Association of Business Trial Lawyers of Northern California Seminar San Francisco, 1999

“Federal Motions That Do It All: Get What You Need, Educate the Judge, Keep the Government on the Sidelines—and Even Pay Your Bill”National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Spring Meeting and Seminar, “Advocacy Techniques: a Masters’ Course” San Francisco, 1999

Faculty, “Champions of the Courtroom”Annual Trial Symposium of the Litigation Section of the State Bar of California Napa, 1999

“Representing the Corporation and Its Officers in Criminal Proceedings”American Bar Association Business Law Section—Spring Meeting San Francisco, 1999